Morecambe and Wise (Text Only)

Throughout the three months during which they were apart, however, Morecambe and Wise kept in touch with each other, and, at the end of that period, Ernie, unable to stand the situation any longer, went to stay with Eric in Morecambe. Reunited, they tried seaside concert parties, working men’s clubs and all the agents in the area, but there were no engagements to be had. They were saved, yet again, by Sadie. Seeing how no adversity seemed to shake their resolve to resume a career in showbusiness, she decided to accompany them to London and get them their chance. It was an extraordinary act of faith on her part, not to mention a serious financial sacrifice at an uncertain time, but it was certainly appreciated by both Eric and Ernie.

With Sadie at their side they felt that something positive was always likely to happen. She was disciplined, imaginative and, when she needed to be, cunning, and she was certainly tireless in the pursuit of her goals. After finding the three of them a flat – in Momington Crescent – she took them to see an agent33 she had heard of in Charing Cross Road. The agent did not offer to sign them up, but he did make the suggestion that they might go round to the Hippodrome34 in Cranbourne Street on the following Monday and attend the auditions that were being held for a new show, Strike a New Note.

George Black, the show’s producer, knew Ernie Wise from the days when they used to meet at Angmering-on-Sea. He had heard a few favourable reports about Morecambe and Wise in recent months, but, when they auditioned before him, he seemed less than enthusiastic. ‘How much are you earning these days, boys?’ he asked. Wise, belying his growing reputation as a shrewd negotiator, answered honestly, ‘Oh, about £20 between the two of us.’ Black smiled and said, ‘Right. I’ll give you that!’35 The failure to follow the bargaining ritual of naming an exaggerated sum before accepting, with mock reluctance, a lower but still very satisfactory offer was, at such an early stage in their careers, understandable. This was not, however, the last of their disappointments: Black did not want the double-act at all, he revealed, but just the two of them as individuals ‘doing bits and pieces’.36

They were crestfallen. Ernie, with the daring stubbornness for which he would later become famous, responded: ‘Mr Black, if you don’t want our act, I don’t think we are really interested.’37 Black – not to mention Morecambe – was somewhat taken aback by the sheer impudence of this, but, quickly regaining his composure, he made a minor concession: if the second comic in the show, Alec ‘Mr Funny Face’ Pleon, was ever indisposed, the double-act could take his place. At that, they shook hands with Black and went off with Sadie to celebrate their first engagement in over three months.

Strike a New Note opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre on 18 March 1943. The programme heralded ‘George Black and the Rising Generation’, and, inside, an insert read: ‘HERE IS YOUTH. These boys and girls have been gathered from every part of the country. All are players of experience, needing but the opportunity to make themselves known. They have worked, they have learned; this then is their chance to show what they are worth.’38 The cast included the comedian and singer Derek Roy, the South African musical comedy performer Zoe Gail, Bernard Hunter, Betty and Billy Dainty and the dancer Johnny Brandon, but, without any doubt, the stars of the show very quickly became the brilliant comedian from Birmingham Sid Field and his excellent straight-man Jerry Desmonde.

Field was hardly a representative of ‘Youth’. He had been touring the provinces for years, largely unknown to Southern audiences and critics, and now, suddenly, at the age of thirty-nine, he found himself being hailed as the proverbial ‘overnight success’. He was a comic with a gift for dialects (‘I’m not drinking that sterf!’) and his own personal repertory of characters: the spiv ‘Slasher Green’, the camp photographer, the would-be snooker player, the unteachable golfer, the music professor and the quick-change artiste. ‘No more naturalistic clown walked the land,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan of him, adding that now, with the assistance of the admirably disciplined and unselfish Jerry Desmonde, he appeared beyond comparison: ‘Nobody has done such things before on our stages’.39 Another, very experienced, critic said of that first night:

Never before have I heard such gales of laughter and applause whirling through a theatre … The man in front of me laughed so helplessly that he had to be carried out, and given first aid. I, myself, felt weak with mirth. I was sure that every man and woman was longing to shout to the comedian on that stage: ‘For mercy’s sake, stop! You’ll kill us with laughter.’40

It was a good show to be a part of. Although neither Morecambe nor Wise had much to do, and Alec Pleon’s health – in spite of daily prayers to the contrary from Eric and Ernie – remained depressingly hardy, both of them realised that there was a priceless education to be had from watching two inspired performers like Field and Desmonde, and they also appreciated the fact that the sight of such a successful show on any performer’s curriculum vitae – regardless of how minor a role they may actually have played in its popularity – was guaranteed to impress prospective employers. They relished the opportunity to bask vicariously in Fields’ newly won celebrity: any star who happened to be visiting London at the time seemed to make a point of seeing the show, and among the visitors backstage whom Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise encountered were Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Deborah Kerr, Alfred Hitchcock and George Raft. On one memorable occasion, Adolphe Menjou complimented Wise on his typically spirited impression of Jimmy Cagney singing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ (which proved, of course, sufficient encouragement for him to reprise the performance at regular intervals during the next thirty years). They also met innumerable West End stars at drinks parties hosted by Wendy Toye, the show’s choreographer.

Throughout all of the seductive hubbub of this brightly unfamiliar showbusiness world, Morecambe and Wise continued to work diligently to promote their critically neglected double-act: ‘At least we loved our act,’ said Wise; ‘we thought it wonderful and were prepared to do it anywhere, anytime, at the drop of a hat.’41 They played several dates at the American officers’ club in Hans Crescent, off the Brompton Road. They stood in at short notice for indisposed acts on local Variety bills. They even played in people’s front rooms – anything to keep in practise and keep being noticed. They also managed during this period to make their very first radio appearances together when the BBC broadcast a special version of Strike a New Note on 16 April 1943, followed in May and June by a ‘spin-off’ series, Youth Must Have Its Swing, on the Home Service.42 In spite of their persistence, however, not everyone was convinced that the double-act had a future. Wendy Toye, for example – who had watched them perform both in the theatre and, slightly less willingly perhaps, in the middle of one of her soirées – continued to regard their partnership with a certain amount of scepticism. ‘I was very fond of both of them,’ she would recall, ‘but I did all I could to separate them’:

I remember saying to Eric, ‘You know, Eric, you’re such a wonderful comedian, you ought to be your own stand-up comedian,’ and I remember taking Ernie to one side and saying to him, ‘That lad’s holding you back – you ought to be a solo song-and-dance man. You’d go straight into musicals and do very, very well.’ They stuck together, thank goodness, but just think: I nearly put a stop to that great double-act!43

Ernie Wise, by this time, was quite impervious to such advice. His often overlooked yet invaluable capacity for loyalty was very evident here – as, indeed, it would be at several crucial points later on in the act’s development – and even Sadie was surprised by how utterly devoted he had become to his partner. Although Wise was, strictly speaking, the one with the more distinguished past and still, some were saying, the more obviously promising future, he seemed perfectly content to let Morecambe berate him at regular intervals for his supposed inadequacies. ‘You’re not a bit of good,’ Morecambe would shout at him after he had forgotten or mistimed a tag line. ‘You’re supposed to have learnt this.’44 On one occasion, Sadie, feeling that things had gone too far, intervened by ordering Eric to leave the room. Ernie’s reaction, she would recall, was entirely unexpected:

Ernie turned to me. ‘You know, you shouldn’t have interfered.’

‘But I’m sticking up for you,’ I said.

‘Don’t you see? Eric is only trying to make me the best feed in the country, like Jerry Desmonde is to Sid Field,’ Ernie said.

‘Make you the feed!’

‘Yes, and shall I tell you something? He’s going to be the best comic in the British Isles.’

Later I told Eric this, and there was no more temperament from my son, never another cross word, never any more argument.45

Their progress, however, was interrupted abruptly on 27 November 1943 with the arrival of Ernie Wise’s call-up papers. He had the option of joining the Army, the Merchant Navy or going down the mines; he decided to join the Merchant Navy, anticipating an exotic life at sea but ending up ferrying coal from Newcastle and South Shields down to Battersea Power Station in London for the Gas Light and Coke Company. Eric Morecambe, who was not due to be called up before May of the following year, stayed on in Strike a New Note until it finally broke up. He then found a job in ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association46) as a straight-man to a Blackpool comic called Gus Morris (brother of the more talented Dave Morris). When his papers did eventually arrive, he opted to become a Bevin Boy,47 volunteering to work down the mines in Accrington for Hargreaves Collieries. Eleven months later, however, he was classified C3 with what was referred to at the time as a touch of heart trouble and was sent home to Morecambe – first to rest and regain his good health, and then to work once again at the local razor-blade factory.

Sadie Bartholomew, scanning the ‘wanted’ columns in The Stage, came across the news that a touring show was looking for a straight-man for its principal comic, Billy Revell. Morecambe got the job, earning £12 per week, and the show ran for six months. Wise was also doing his best to keep himself involved in showbusiness during this period. He had been made part of a permanent reserve of seamen available for placement anywhere in the world at short notice, but, as there were often long breaks between postings, he took the opportunity to keep in touch with a circle of agents and producers who provided him with a steady supply of short-term engagements around the country (billing him as a ‘boy from the brave merchant navy’48). When at last he was discharged in April 1945 he returned to a civilian life still committed to the world of entertainment but now, it seemed, as a solo performer. During his prolonged separation from Morecambe the idea of being part of a double-act had lost some of its appeal – perhaps because of a belief that, at eighteen, it was time to redeem a once promising but recently stalled career, and a solo act might prove more adaptable than a double-act in an increasingly competitive market-place.

Morecambe and Wise might never have reformed their partnership had not, yet again, another happy accident intervened. Sadie had taken Eric to London in order to assist him, once again, in his search for work.49 After finding a suitable base in theatrical digs owned and presided over by a Mrs Nell Duer at 13 Clifton Gardens, in Chiswick, they had started the onerous task of scouring all of the showbusiness papers and visiting innumerable agents in the hope of chancing upon an opening. One day, as they walked purposefully along Regent Street, Eric glanced across to see the familiar figure of Ernie Wise waving frantically from the other side of the street.50 When Sadie discovered that Ernie was staying in a rather insalubrious form of accommodation in Brixton, she invited him to move in with her and Eric: ‘You two might as well be out of work together as separately,’ she remarked.51

As it happened, Sadie soon found work for both of them in a peculiar hybrid of a show that went under the grandiose title of Lord John Sanger’s Circus & Variety. This particular combination of Circus and Variety had been popularised in the Victorian era by a colourful showman called ‘Lord’ George Sanger.52 George Sanger’s involvement had ended abruptly back in 1911 when his manservant – in an egregious fit of pique – battered him to death with a hatchet, but the tradition stretched on into the post-war years under the watchful eye of the similarly self-ennobled ‘Lord’ John. The reasoning behind the project was that provincial audiences, starved of top-class professional entertainment and lacking the grand music-halls of the big cities, would welcome the opportunity to sample the respective delights of Circus and Variety within the same makeshift arena. It seemed, as both Morecambe and Wise would later remark, a good idea at the time.

Sanger’s brother, Edward – who had known Morecambe and Wise since the days when he assisted Bryan Michie on Youth Takes a Bow – booked each of them separately for the tour. Wise was selected first – as a comic – on a wage of £12 per week. Morecambe, much to his and Sadie’s surprise, was selected as Wise’s ‘Wellma boy’ – the straight-man who starts with the self-assured line ‘Well, my boy, and what are you going to do tonight?’ only to be insulted by the irreverent comic – on a wage of £10 per week.53 It was, at least as far as Eric and Sadie were concerned, a less than satisfactory arrangement, but, as no alternative engagements were available and no money was coming in, there was nothing to do but to accept it.

The show travelled from place to place in a slow procession of converted RAF trailers, putting up the big top on village greens or in conveniently situated fields. On arrival, the performers themselves were obliged to set out seats for up to seven hundred people, put down the sawdust, set up the stage and help sell the tickets. Included on the bill were Speedy Yelding, ‘Britain’s Greatest Clown’; the singer Mollie Seddon, ‘A Thrill to Your Eyes, Ears & Heart’; Peter, ‘The Equine Marvel’; Evelyn’s Dogs & Pigeons; a quartet of dancers, ‘The Four Flashes’; Eric Morecambe and ‘England’s Mickey Rooney’, Ernie Wise. Each prospective member of the audience, as he or she pondered the 3s. 6d. that was the price of admission, was urged not to ’fail to visit the pets comer after the performance’.54

It did not go to plan. Audiences – when there were any – arrived expecting an event of Barnum and Bailey proportions, and were not at all pleased to discover that, far from a fierce menagerie of lions, tigers and elephants, the best that Sanger could offer them was one tired-looking donkey, a silent parrot, two chubby hamsters, a team of performing dogs, a shivering wallaby and a ring-tailed lemur. In between these so-called Circus acts the Variety performers, such as Morecambe and Wise, filled-in with, in their own words, ‘unfunny sketches and unfunny jokes’.55

Sanger himself lived and travelled in comfort, but his employees were not so fortunate. Each battered old trailer contained a canvas bucket as a make-shift sink and the artistes’ bathroom at each site consisted of a hole in the ground surrounded by a malodorous canvas screen. Meals were cooked over campfires and served on dented tin plates to be consumed under a nearby tree. Although both Morecambe and Wise came from relatively humble backgrounds, they enjoyed their creature comforts none the less and loathed this sharp taste of life on the road. Their lowest point came when they were obliged to perform in front of an audience made up of just six young boys, all of whom were seated right at the very back of the cavernous marquee in the cheapest of the seven hundred seats.

Things went from bad to worse. First, everyone was obliged to take a cut in their wages: Morecambe’s went down to £5 per week, Wise’s to £7. They were then forced into taking part in an increasingly embarrassing and exhausting succession of gimmicks, the last of which involved the marquee being converted into a booth through which the audience wandered while the company somehow managed to perform no fewer than seventy-three shows in three days. Finally, to the disappointment of no one except, perhaps, Sanger himself, the show came to a premature end in October 1947 at Nottingham’s Goose Fair. Morecambe and Wise, tired-eyed and chap-fallen, dragged themselves back to their old digs at Mrs Duer’s in Chiswick and pondered their immediate future.

It was, without doubt, a bleak time for both of them, but perhaps especially so for Ernie Wise, whose career had begun almost a decade before in such propitious circumstances. Mickey Rooney, by the tender age of twenty-two, had made over a hundred two-reel Hollywood comedies, been handed a special Academy Award and had married the very beautiful Ava Gardner, whereas Wise – supposedly Britain’s answer to America’s indefatigably spirited child star – was at the same age stuck in cramped digs in Chiswick, single, unemployed and in very grave danger, it seemed, of being forgotten. Sadie Bartholomew, by this time, had returned home to Morecambe, which left the two of them feeling even more insecure and uncertain. Sadie’s endless stream of sobering proverbs – such as ‘Marry a girl and your fourpenny pie will cost you eight pence’56 – continued to echo in their heads. Neither of them yet drank alcohol, nor did either of them have any time for any of the other recreational pursuits associated with their profession, and each tried as best he could (Wise with greater success than Morecambe) to save what money he possessed, but it was still a period of considerable anxiety.

Out-of-work Variety acts, they soon discovered, tended to converge on an unprepossessing Express Dairy café that was situated, in those days, near the Leicester Square tube station. Every morning the place would be packed with the usual mixture of young, old, ex- and would-be performers, each cupping their hands gratefully around hot mugs of tea and announcing loudly but unconvincingly that they had, or would soon have, or would definitely have for certain in a month or two, a marvellous job lined up for themselves. Overhearing these fanciful monologues, Morecambe and Wise noticed that agents seemed to be crucial figures in this profession, and, as a consequence, they made up their minds to find one for themselves as soon as possible.

One way to attract an agent, they were told, was to get oneself on to the bill of certain key Variety theatres – such as the Metropolitan on the Edgware Road, the Brixton Empress or the East Ham Palace – which functioned as shop windows for new talent, but, paradoxically, Morecambe and Wise found it hard to secure a booking at such places without the assistance of an agent: it was a vicious circle. Determined somehow to get noticed, and to improve their act in the process, they lowered their sights and started accepting anything: one-off club and pub nights, masonic dances, a very rough week at a rowdy venue near Barry Docks in Cardiff, the odd date with ENSA, the occasional day’s work at the Nuffield Centre (a club just off Piccadilly where ex- and current servicemen could perform), a short tour of the American army camps in Germany and even the occasional private party. The only bona fide Variety engagement they attracted during this depressingly barren period was for a week at the Palace, Walthamstow in March 1948, but even this modest success was diminished by the fact that because one of the other, more established acts was called Vic Wise and Nita Lane, Morecambe and Wise – to avoid causing any confusion – were billed as ‘Morecambe and Wisdom’.57

The one bright spot amidst all of this gloom was the kindness of their landlady, Nell Duer. Although there were stretches of fourteen to eighteen weeks at a time when Morecambe and Wise were unable to pay their rent she remained remarkably sympathetic to their plight, telling them just to pay her when they could afford to. When things became intolerable they would take an overnight bus to Morecambe and stay with Eric’s parents for a week – sometimes a fortnight – before returning, well-fed and with a couple more pounds in their pockets, to mount yet another attempt at finding long-term employment. Oddly enough, however, neither Morecambe nor Wise was ever tempted during this time to seek a job outside of showbusiness: ‘The matter was never broached between us,’ said Wise. ‘We were Variety artists; we were pros. To consider anything else would have been heresy.’58

The post-war years were not easy times for any young entertainer to find employment. London was besieged by returning ex-servicemen nursing hopes of establishing (or, in a few cases, re-establishing) themselves in showbusiness: comics such as Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine, Eric Sykes, Graham Stark, Jimmy Edwards, Tommy Cooper, Benny Hill, Dick Emery, Eric Barker, Harry Worth, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Max Bygraves, Bruce Forsyth, Norman Wisdom, Alfred Marks and Arthur English were all back in the capital and all clamouring for an opportunity to show an agent or impresario or a BBC producer just what they could do. It was, to say the least, a fiercely competitive time. Morecambe and Wise, in the course of their long-running search for work, gravitated – like most other comics – to the one place in London where they felt they might be given the chance to perform: the Windmill Theatre in Great Windmill Street, Soho. The Windmill, since 1932, had been permitted by the Lord Chamberlain to present – as one element of the Variety revues known as Revudeville – nude tableaux on condition that all of the young women remained perfectly still for the duration of each presentation, the stage lighting was always ‘subdued’ and no ‘artificial aids to vision’ were permitted in the auditorium.

Its owner, Vivian Van Damm (known to everyone as ‘VD’), was involved in every aspect of the running of the theatre, from opening the office mail to hiring and firing the artistes. He was sufficiently proud of the fact that the Windmill had remained open throughout the war to coin the slogan, ‘We Never Closed’, and he was sufficiently astute not to object when this was perverted into ‘We Never Clothed’ by the habitués of the shows for which his stage was famous. Ann Hamilton, who in 1959 became the five hundredth Windmill Girl and would later become the regular female presence in The Morecambe & Wise Show, recalled: ‘He would always say that we were in showbusiness – with the accent on show. Because of censorship he never told the girls to show everything, but, as far as the Fan Dance was concerned, he certainly wasn’t averse to the fans being lowered to reveal the breasts, which could always be explained away as an unfortunate slip.’59

Van Damm preferred to employ women as young as fourteen and a half, but he would often continue to employ them until it was deemed that they required the support of a bra. He was part benevolent father figure, part seedy voyeur: on the one hand, he would see that all of his young women were groomed in elocution, make-up, deportment, dress sense and singing and dancing skills, and also that each of them received free medical and dental treatment; on the other hand, as Ann Hamilton recalled:

He would never knock when he entered the dressing-room. It was so hot in there, deep in the bowels of the earth where the girls had to change, that people would sit around with nothing on – because it was all girls together. He knew that, and he always walked straight in, but we’d know when he was on his way because you could hear his little shuffling footsteps and smell the smoke from his cigar.60

Although Van Damm took great delight in erecting a mahogany plaque outside on the comer of his theatre that listed all of those ‘Stars of Today Who Started Their Careers in This Theatre’, most if not all of the performers whom he claimed to have either ‘discovered’ or ‘nurtured’ were, in reality, regarded merely as tolerable distractions during the brief intervals that separated one nude tableau from the next. His policy was to audition almost anyone who applied to him, but he was by no means as easy to please as has sometimes been implied (his daughter, Sheila, estimated that around 75 per cent of all applicants were rejected61). Harry Secombe, who worked there during 1946, remembered the sad fate suffered by a Chinese illusionist who was auditioned by Van Damm: after spending most of the previous night sweating over his routine and preparing all of his elaborate props and painting on his intricate make-up, he shuffled on to the stage, bowed slowly with Chinese precision, and was just about to open his mouth when Van Damm shouted ‘Thank you’, thus forcing him to shuffle all the way back off again in silence.62 In his time, Van Damm also dismissed, with a similarly curt ‘Thank you’, Spike Milligan, Roy Castle, Charlie Drake, Norman Wisdom, Benny Hill and Kenneth Tynan. It was, however, as Morecambe and Wise discovered, one of the least worst places to attract the attention of a relatively good London agent. Peter Prichard, a regular visitor in those days, remarked: